Critics reviews

Like Alexander himself, who inexorably moves toward an act that's both foolhardy and awe-inspiring, The Sacrifice eventually transcends the flaws in its design. In its second half, the film embraces a dream logic that captures its protagonist's mix of woozy terror and almost childlike guilelessness more elegantly than any of his early verbal musings could.

What remain are some of the most haunting moments of the director's career: The sudden and uncanny desaturation of the film's image--courtesy of master cinematographer Sven Nykvist--as Erland Josephson roams his estate in a nuclear daze; the flickering TV test pattern reflected on the family in tableau; the film's breathtaking denouement, which never ceases to terrify me. These are the images I return to again and again.

...Tarkovsky's other work of exile was his haunting, supernatural-tinged last film The Sacrifice (1986), shot on the Swedish island of Gotland, and not in his native language. It looks at times like a Bergman film – not surprising given he enlisted Bergman's brilliant cinematographer Sven Nykvist.

Tarkovsky's seventh and final film requires of a contemporary audience a contemporary forfeit—for the film to work, for its duration all distractions must be kept at bay. In a way, this is also the challenge facing Alexander (Bergman's Erland Josephson), once an actor and these days a theatre critic who's frustrated with the uselessness of words.

It's a grand, unworldly, even antiworldly religious vision that depends on its perfect pitch to avoid absurdity and bathos... The blend of midlife crisis and existential terror is reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but Tarkovsky makes it a world of his own. His images have a transcendental glow and a hieratic poise; alternating between contemplative distance and moral confrontation, they assert, in the most radical sense, the high cost of living—the unbearable price of earthly delights.

It's always visually potent, and the density and extremity of the allegory are humblingly vast by the end. For these reasons, without pretending to get engrossed in it in quite the way I do in Andrei Rublev and several other Tarkovsky films, I don't mind too much that in theme, story, and scale, the movie oscillates between compelling our thunderstruck confidence and testing our patience with unfulfilled promise and highbrow clichés.

The themes of apocalypse and the redemptive innocence of childhood, of muteness and (holy) madness, of magic, memory, and dreams, are classic Tarkovsky, and the film is full of imagery that recalls THE MIRROR (including a levitating Icelandic witch), STALKER, and NOSTALGHIA. Shot by the great Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist in otherworldly northern light, THE SACRIFICE is bracketed by two of the longest (and riskiest) takes in the history of cinema.

The burning house would represent not only the culmination of Tarkovsky's final film but of his life and work as a whole. For within its spectacular – and possibly Zoroastrian – flames the beautiful but gloomy and ultimately paralizing nostalgia, congealed in all those houses that have appeared so insistently in Tarkovsky's other films, is finally not only dispelled but transfigured, into light, into madness and into laughter through the joyful affirmation of the Moment and of Life.

The Sacrifice is Andrei Tarkovsky's final, visually intoxicating and profoundly spiritual masterpiece about the end of the world... [It's] a devastating, but powerfully reaffirming film on love, humanity, and faith.

Tarkovsky's last film isn't on the same level as his extraordinary Stalker, but it's a fitting apocalyptic statement, made when he knew he was dying of cancer. The first and penultimate shots... manage to say more than most films do over their entire length... As with Nostalghia, Tarkovsky's previous work of exile, it's possible to balk at the filmmaker's pretensions and antiquated sexual politics and yet be overwhelmed by his mastery and originality, as well as the conviction of his sincerity.

The Sacrifice is long, loaded with longeurs (viewers fight over which bits are boring, just as they fight over what the movie means), and rarely rational and – except for the journey-into-a-soul superstructure – almost never linear. Despite those reservations, it is a magnificent experience: watching it, you can feel Tarkovsky's life ebbing, but with vitality, dignity, candour, concern and, most of all, artistry – "with hope and confidence."

The new film, I am sad to report, is at best an ordeal of high quality... The murky and somnambulistic central section (in spite of two little incidents: the end of the world and its salvation) is a long, slow dirge. I found it dramatically unconvincing, philosophically simplistic to the point of absurdity, and played out in sets which are maddeningly daint-chic and "pretty."